Data communication systems exchange user data for user devices to provide various data communication services. The user devices may be phones, computers, machines, and the like. The data communication services might be media conferencing, social networking, machine communications, or internet access. Software-Defined Networks (SDNs) are a popular data communication system. SDNs are made of applications, controllers, and data-plane machines.
SDN applications interact with users and other systems to deliver control-plane management of communication networks and users in the SDN. The SDN applications exchange SDN signaling, such as open flow, with SDN controllers to implement the control-plane management. The SDN controllers exchange SDN signaling like open flow with SDN data-plane machines. The SDN data-plane machines process user data flows based on Flow Description Tables (FDTs). The FDTs correlate header data like destination address to flow operations like packet drop or forward.
A Proxy Correlation Index (PCI) server transfers PCI configurations to the SDN controllers and data-plane machines. The PCI configurations have specific Key Performance Indicator (KPI) inputs and specific PCI inputs. The PCI configurations have PCI algorithms to generate PCIs from KPIs and other PCIs. The PCI configurations have other PCI algorithms that apply PCI thresholds to KPIs, PCIs, and to the result of KPI/PCI processing. The PCI configurations indicate corresponding SDN actions to take upon breach of these PCI thresholds. An exemplary SDN action might be to update an FDT in an SDN data-plane machine.
The SDN controllers and data-plane machines generate KPIs based on the PCI configurations. The SDN controllers and data-plane machines process the KPIs to generate the PCIs based on the PCI configurations and may process KPI/PCI combinations to generate PCIs. The SDN controllers and data-plane machines process their PCIs against PCI thresholds to determine PCI threshold breaches. The SDN controllers and data-plane machines and transfer PCI data about their PCI threshold breaches to the PCI server. The PCI server may process the PCIs and PCI breach data to initiate FDT updates for the SDN data-plane machines.
Unfortunately, the distribution of PCI data within the SDN remains inefficient and ineffective. Moreover, the distribution of PCI breach data across the SDN data-plane is poorly handled. The deployment of machine learning on an SDN-wide level is inhibited by this problem.